


And When It Comes to Her

by theleaveswant



Category: Hard Core Logo (1996), Trigger (2010)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Codependency, Drugs, F/F, F/M, Gen, Multi, Musicians, One of My Favorites, Rock and Roll, Toronto, Winter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-30
Updated: 2011-07-30
Packaged: 2017-10-21 23:54:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/231272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theleaveswant/pseuds/theleaveswant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Another stumble on the rocky road to rock and roll bliss (late '90s Toronto, before the hit single and the European tour)</p>
            </blockquote>





	And When It Comes to Her

**Author's Note:**

  * For [deborah_judge](https://archiveofourown.org/users/deborah_judge/gifts).



> For Deborah Judge. Contains drug and alcohol abuse (Vic hasn't discovered a taste for heroin yet but she will soon, and Kat's drinking is already a source of tension) and other dark themes. Kat's voicemail request is inspired by a TFLN post I saw several months ago. Thanks to Helens78 for the beta.

“You good?” asks the sound guy, Eddie, and Vic is momentarily touched by his concern before she deciphers that what he really means is, “can I go now?”

She nods and hefts the guitar case on her shoulder, shifting it back on her hip. “Yeah, I got it from here. Thanks.”

He raises two fingers to his forehead in wry salute and tromps off down the hallway, leaving wet splats of road sand and snow melting on the faded runner. Vic rips off her glove with her teeth so she can root around one-handed in her pocket for her keys. She gets them out and reaches for the lock but her hand is shaking too badly to send them home. She leans her forehead on the apartment door and clutches the jagged, body-warm metal in her fist, sucking deep breaths through her nose. “Dammit, Kat,” she mutters.

She gets the door open and starts hauling the gear inside, piling it even more haphazardly than it was stacked in the hallway. Brian calls to her from the living room but makes no effort to help. “How was the gig?”

Vic growls.

“That good, huh?”

She puts Kat's guitar on top of a teetering heap of crap and restrains herself from picking it up when it clatters to the floor. Truth is, the gig was fine, better than fine, great energy and healthy CD sales, until Kat fucked off in a cab with some guys she'd just met as soon as the crowd let out and left Vic to pack up on her own.

She kicks off her wet boots in the hallway and with a sigh goes to join Brian on the couch, sinking into the cushions, still wrapped in her parka. Brian looks her over once then goes back to flipping channels.

“Kat called,” he says over a detergent commercial with his mouth full of sugary cereal.

Vic's lip curls. “Was it an apology?” War movie, bodies bursting like meat-filled water balloons.

“Dunno, I was in the bathroom.” Stand-up comic making blowfish faces. “She left a message, it's still on the machine.”

NFB short. Vic stays slouched on the couch for a verse and a chorus of “The Logdriver's Waltz” before she heaves herself back upright and takes the phone with her to the bedroom to listen, shrugging out of her military coat as she goes. The message opens with a bright volley of laughter like gunfire that startles Vic and makes her grit her teeth. “Vic!” Kat hollers through the phone. “Bring your weed and the hat with the floppy ears; we're going to go hotbox an igloo.” This is followed by an address near College on the other side of Bathurst, more laughter, and a thud before the recording terminates.

The hand holding the phone drops to her side. Her eyes slide unbidden towards the clothing pile she knows the hat with the floppy ears is in and she stares at it for a long moment. Finally she turns on her heel, swearing to herself that she's only going to give Kat a piece of her mind and then come right back to bask in the warmth of her righteous anger and a Body Shop bubble bath. She shoves the baggie of weed in her pocket just in case, though, as she goes out to bundle herself up again. The hat stays where it is.

She builds up a good head of anger on the walk, her cheeks burning as much from emotion as from the cold, but when she gets to the house the first words out of her mouth are “It's a quinzee.”

“Vic!” Kat calls as she runs down the walk to hug her bandmate, who stiffens in her sloppy embrace.

“You said igloo. That's not an igloo.”

Kat shakes her head. “What's the difference?”

“That's a hollowed-out snow pile, it's called a quinzee. An igloo is made of blocks of packed snow.”

“Oh, whatever. Did you bring the pot?”

Vic nods reluctantly. “You shouldn't have taken off after the show.”

“What, did something happen? Oh god, I'm sorry.”

“No, nothing _happened_. You just shouldn't have taken off and left me to take care of everything.”

“But you did, though, right?”

“Did what?”

“Take care of everything.”

“Well yeah, I had to.”

“So what's the big deal?” She grabs hold of Vic's arm and tugs her towards the snow-shelter. “Come on, let's spark this bitch.”

Vic tugs back, pulling her sleeve out of Kat's bare-fingered grip. She ought to be freezing, but she's clearly well-fortified with rye enough that she doesn't feel it. “Not until you apologize.”

“For what?”

“For—you fuck, I just told you for what.”

“Okay, okay. I'm sorry I took off and it'll never happen again. I promise. But I had to go with them, V. For the band. One of them's got connections in Europe, club promoters and stuff. He said he could help us book stuff over there, Vic, think about it.”

Vic frowned. “Which one?”

Kat gestures vaguely at the clot of people milling around the door of the house. “I don't know. Kyle. The bearded one. Now come on, you're ruining the party.”

Hotboxing a non-igloo turns out to be a better idea on paper than it is in real life; the quinzee's barely big enough for two and the entrance tunnel, already ill-sized for this use, rapidly deteriorates under the repeated clumsy passage of inebriated bohemians. Vic wonders who built the thing. She has no idea whose yard this is, but her suspicion that their occupation is less than legit is supported when the revellers eventually give in and retreat to the house next door to warm up.

Inside, Vic sits on the floor under the living room window next to the radiator and Kyle, whose name is actually Kevin, brings her a rum and coke. It turns out he really does have connections in Europe, but nothing that will help them get bookings. Kat waves at her from a clump of people by the stairs and Vic rolls her eyes.

She catches sight of curved wood and rawhide strips, too big for tennis rackets, poking out from behind the sofa. “Are those . . .?” She asks, pointing.

They are snowshoes, but they're much too battered to be functional. Kylevin shows her the cracked frames and patches of missing latticework, ribbons of leather dried out and snapped or chewed out by animals. He tells her how he picked them up off a curb one summer with plans of restoration, but, like so many things, just never got around to it. He smiles, humble and tinged with regret, and Vic nods understandingly. She lets him put his hand on the back of her neck.

When she wakes up the next morning, her first thought is a reflection on how not surprised she is to find herself in bed with him. The next is to wonder what happened to Kat. Vic thinks maybe it's a protection that comes with the name, nine lives, landing feet first, something like that, that keeps Kat so lucky; no matter how many losers she teases and flirts with at a party, she usually attracts at least one sap who'll make sure she gets home in one piece, sometimes even before she passes out. Usually, that is. Not always.

When she gets home Brian's on the couch as usual, empty cereal bowl at his feet. Vic ruffles his hair and he hands her a paper flower from his bathrobe pocket. “This was in the mailbox,” he says.

Vic unfolds the flower. It's a receipt from King's Cafe. On the back are written in Sharpie the words “sorry never drink again love K”, with no punctuation. She tries to fold it up again but it's crumpled now, lopsided. Still, she sticks it to the edge of the mirror on her bedroom vanity and looks at it intermittently as she sits down with her guitar to write.

Things are pretty good for about three weeks, until an early thaw sets the city dripping with clogged eaves and overflowing gutters and Kat shows up at Lee's Palace for soundcheck a half-hour later than Vic and already hammered. Vic seethes for the rest of the evening. It's not like she expects Kat to be sober all the time—this is rock and roll, after all, and she's hardly a poster girl for clean living herself, but at least she saves getting fucked up for _after_ the show. Mostly. Sometimes. On a good day.

She accepts a free hit of coke in the green room, which she ought to know by now is never the good idea it seems at the time—powdered instant asshole, ready in minutes, just add Sawchyn—but right now her anger feels crisp and sharp. She catches Kat chatting up the cute redhead from Vancouver, manoeuvring her deliberately into Vic's line of sight and flashing heated looks over her shoulder, and Vic steps closer to Sook-Yin, trying to radiate genuine interest in her witty anecdote while her fists clench and release inside her pockets. It's not fair. Kat shows up to gigs late and intoxicated and everybody crowds around to coo and cop a feel as they lean in close for a photograph, but if Vic ever tried to pull that shit they'd—well, she's not sure what would happen but she's pretty sure it includes the phrase 'handcuffed and bleeding in the back of a cruiser'.

Their set is a mess; Kat flubs the words and misses cues on every song they attempt and Vic keeps breaking strings, she's holding on so tight. Finally, when Kat tries to grind up against Vic's ass and mock-fellate the microphone at the same time, a familiar step in the lie-truth-lie dance of the stage-lesbian relationship that Vic has no patience for tonight, she shrugs her off so hard that Kat staggers, trips over an instrument cable and falls down hard on the stage-left monitor, knocking it off onto the floor.

The audience stumble back fast enough that nobody gets clipped, but Kat's out-flung hand does nothing to arrest the monitor's fall. It lands with a crunch on the beer-stained floor and starts to smoke. The smell is so familiar. Kat laughs nervously and weaves to her feet.

“Rock and roll!” She salutes the crowd.

Vic just stares as one of the staff—she doesn't notice who—pushes through the crowd with a fire extinguisher for the sparking wreckage. There's a delay while the mess gets cleaned up, and then they're allowed to finish out the set. Which they do, but the energy is all off, acrid fumes coiling around the room that have nothing to do with busted speakers.

After the show there's a tense meeting with the venue manager during which many harsh names are called and Trigger reluctantly agree to sacrifice their share of the door to cover the equipment cost, or at least Vic does. She's not sure she believes that Kat will remember this in the morning.

Vic's past feeling by the time she gets Kat home, her fury all burned down to ashes. She doesn't try to hold Kat's hair while she throws up in the bathtub but she does get her a plastic cup of water and sit on the lid of the toilet while she sips it, knees pulled up, skirt bunched around her waist so that only her poison green underwear sits between her bare ass and the cold tile floor.

“I miss Joe,” Kat says, and Vic wonders where that came from. She's pretty sure this isn't an anniversary or anything. “And John and Billy and everybody who goes away. I miss everybody. I miss you.”

“I'm right here.”

“Vic, I miss you so much.” Kat twists around on the floor so that she can hug Vic's knees. Vic strokes her hair, inured by now to getting sick on her jeans, and feels her start to ragdoll. She drags her to the bedroom and props her on her side with pillows and battered stuffed animals, then gets the spare vodka from behind the ice cream in Kat's kitchen freezer and comes back to keep her company.


End file.
